Money and Banks

Carl Menger, from his classic treatise, on the origins of the means of payment.

This audio Mises Daily is narrated by Floy Lilley.

Thus, Mankiw's solution for dealing with unprecedented excess reserves is for the Fed to create even more reserves in order to pay bankers not to make new loans. Does that sound like a good long-term plan for the economy?

A money-substitute can be embodied either in a banknote or in a demand deposit with a bank subject to check (”checkbook money” or depos

In reality, money is as easily supplied by the free market as any other good.

Politicians, bureaucrats, regulators, modern financial commentators, Nobel Prize–winning economists and central bankers have proven they lack any knowledge of what money is and what causes business cycles.

Ah, the greens. They’re not just treehuggers anymore.

Washington should be lowering taxes and the costs of hiring employees, especially in industries that produce capital and wealth.

Although Aristotle, in the Greek tradition, scorned moneymaking and was scarcely a partisan of laissez-faire, he set forth a trenchant argument in

The task of the theory of money consists merely in dealing with that component in the valuation of money which is conditioned by its function as a

Money originates by free markets via barter and gold and silver, not by governments via fiat. A story of Halloween candy demonstrates this.  The double coincidence of wants is solved by money. Money that will last will be six things: generally marketable, divisible, high value per unit weight (portable), durable, recognizable, and homogeneous.